A NEW YORK
TIMES BESTSELLER
Former
Republican political operative Tim Miller answers the question no one else has
fully grappled with: Why did normal people go along with the worst of Trumpism?
As one of
the strategists behind the famous 2012 RNC “autopsy,” Miller conducts his own forensic
study on the pungent carcass of the party he used to love, cutting into all the
hubris, ambition, idiocy, desperation, and self-deception for everyone to see.
In a bracingly honest reflection on both his own past work for the Republican
Party and the contortions of his former peers in the GOP establishment, Miller
draws a straight line between the actions of the 2000s GOP to the Republican
political class's Trumpian takeover, including the horrors of January 6th.
From
ruminations on the mental jujitsu that allowed him as a gay man to justify
becoming a hitman for homophobes, to astonishingly raw interviews with former
colleagues who jumped on the Trump Train, Miller diagrams the flattering and
delusional stories GOP operatives tell themselves so they can sleep at night.
With a humorous touch he reveals Reince Priebus' neediness, Sean Spicer's
desperation, Elise Stefanik and Chris Christie’s raw ambition, and his close
friends’ submission to a MAGA psychosis.
Why We Did
It is a vital, darkly satirical warning that all the narcissistic
justifications that got us to this place still thrive within the Republican
party, which means they will continue to make the same mistakes and political
calculations that got us here, with disastrous consequences for the nation.
‘Why We Did
It’ Is a Dark Ride on the ‘Republican Road to Hell’
The former
political operative Tim Miller writes about why most of the Republican
establishment learned to stop worrying and line up behind President Trump.
WHY WE DID IT
A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell
By Tim
Miller
Too often,
when straining to put some daylight between themselves and the Trump
administration, regretful Republicans have reached for elaborate excuses and
high-toned rhetoric. The former political operative Tim Miller knows better
than to try.
The most
honorable parts of “Why We Did It,” Miller’s darkly funny (if also profoundly
dispiriting) post-mortem/mea culpa, are the ones that dispense with pious
pretense. Miller, a millennial who started working in Republican politics when
he was 16, depicts himself as someone who was so preoccupied with “the Game”
that for years he gave little thought to the degraded culture that his
bare-knuckle tactics helped perpetuate. He liked the excitement, the money, the
mischief. There was a “bizarre type of fame” that came with “D.C.
celebrification,” he writes. He got addicted to the “horse race.” He was in it
to win.
His
fixation on victory was so consuming that it could often override his personal
interests. “Why We Did It” recalls a moment when Miller panicked after John
McCain made a stray comment in 2006 that was barely, just barely, pro-gay
marriage. (McCain later clarified that he was only talking about private
ceremonies; he did “not believe that gay marriages should be legal.”) Miller
was planning to work on McCain’s presidential campaign. Miller is also gay. He
was upset that McCain might hurt his chances with Republican voters, rather
than excited at the prospect of working for someone who didn’t “want to deny me
the ability to have a totally chill, off-the-books, man-man ceremony.”
Miller says
it’s precisely this warped response — his own “championship-level
compartmentalization” — that makes him especially suited to understanding why
most of the Republican establishment learned to stop worrying and line up
behind Trump.
The episode
with McCain was just the beginning. Miller later went on to do P.R. work for
social conservatives who virulently opposed same-sex marriage. “As a gay man
who contorted himself into defending homophobes,” he writes, “I am more than
capable of inhabiting the mind of the enabler.”
The first
half of the book describes Miller’s political coming-of-age — from closeted
young Republican who grew up in a devout Catholic family to a spokesman for Jeb
Bush’s presidential campaign to one of the loudest Never Trumpers during the
2016 election. The second half of “Why We Did It” is a taxonomy of the kind of
Republicans who went MAGA, based on Miller’s conversations with them and his
firsthand knowledge of what makes the most opportunistic D.C. creatures tick.
In between
the two halves is an awkward chapter titled “Inertia,” in which Miller owns up
to going from denouncing Trump before he was elected to working for Scott
Pruitt, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator. (“It was a
trying time and I was desperate.”) Miller later got a contract for
media-monitoring services from the E.P.A. (“icky,” he concedes). Oh, and Miller
also conducted opposition research for Facebook that happened to dovetail with
conspiracy theories, casting the liberal financier and philanthropist George
Soros as the shadowy force behind an anti-Facebook movement. (Miller insists
that this newspaper’s reporting on what happened was “overheated.”)
“I was
favor-trading with people who were causing real-world harm so I could get a pat
on the head from some client who wanted self-serving scuttlebutt fed to the
rubes,” he writes of his career. But as a self-described P.R. flack, Miller
knows how to spin such ugly straw into shiny gold. Who better to identify why
his fellow Republicans got sucked under than someone who kept getting pulled
back in?
The
hardcore Trumpists who loved their candidate from the beginning don’t interest
Miller. His subjects include colleagues who worked with him nearly a decade ago
on the Growth and Opportunity Project, known as the Republican “autopsy,”
organized after Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012. The report called for
moderation, for outreach, for immigration reform. But one by one, the people
working on the project went from abhorring Trump to embracing him.
There was
“the Striver,” Elise Stefanik, the Harvard-educated representative from upstate
New York who “was doing what was required to get the next buzz,” Miller writes.
There was “the Little Mix,” Reince Priebus, who liked “feeling important” and
tried “to stay in everyone’s good graces while the world around him unraveled.”
Miller calls Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer “the Nerd-Revenging
Team Player” who gamely thought that obtaining some status in the White House
might make up for some “negative charisma.” There was a coterie of
“Cartel-Cashing, Team-Playing, Tribalist Trolls,” always on the lookout for the
next gravy train.
Some of
these former colleagues will talk to Miller; others won’t. “Why We Did It”
begins and ends with the story of his friendship with the Republican
fund-raiser Caroline Wren, a fellow “socially liberal millennial,” who worked
with Miller on McCain’s 2008 campaign but more recently made a star turn as a
Trump adviser subpoenaed by the panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the
Capitol.
Wren’s
motivations don’t turn out to be particularly complex; she herself admits that
her politics have always had less to do with the finer details of governing
than the more cultish aspects of personality. “She had come to worship John
McCain,” Miller writes, and she was soon “obsessed with Sarah Palin.” When
pushed to explain what drew her to Trump, whose policies she says repulsed her,
Wren rails against smug progressives driving around in their Priuses and
forcing everyone to drink out of paper straws. She felt intensely annoyed by
their self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. She liked Trump because of what she
calls his “scorch-the-earth mode.”
This
“animus,” Miller says, seems to have been the necessary condition for
converting his “reluctant peers” into Trump supporters. I recommend reading
“Why We Did It” alongside “It Was All a Lie” (2020), by Stuart Stevens, another
“what happened” book by a former Republican operative. Stevens comes across as
thoughtful, deliberative, reflective; Miller comes across as clever, a little
bit mean, extremely profane. Stevens captures how the Republican Party spent
decades cultivating grievances that it didn’t plan to do anything about, while
Miller captures the consequent emotional valence, with its “unseriousness and
cruelty.” Both books are absorbing; neither is particularly hopeful.
“AHHHHHHH,”
an exasperated Miller writes, remembering how he stayed in politics because of
his own thirst for fame and fortune. For all the reluctant Trump supporters’
torturous rationales, maybe the reasons for why they did it don’t get much more
complicated than that.
Jennifer
Szalai is a book critic for The New York Times. She was previously a columnist
and editor for the Book Review. Her work has also appeared in Slate, New York,
The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine, where she was a senior editor until 2010.
.jpeg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário